Being a writer wasn’t something I’d even considered until experiencing what I did in Europe and the story coming to me. I had taken a few creative writing classes in college but gave them scant significance. Writing is as natural as breathing to many of my fellow authors. Nothing in your bio indicates the traditional paths writers take, for example, an MFA program or a career in journalism.
It was impossible to include it in the book (no doubt I’ll hear about that from the techno-fans). For example, the Russians have recently debuted a new main battle tank, the M-14. These things change so fast it is almost impossible to stay current. In the past few years I’ve used Google as a source of keeping up with military units and weapons system changes. The rest we got from reference books and occasional discussions with people who had worked with various weapons. I had significant experience with American command and control systems and some of the weapons in the book, like the Patriot Air Defense Missile system, so that also helped in creating the story. So the bulk of the story came from those firsthand events. I knew what we expected the Soviet Union to do in such a war and what our greatest fears were. Since I had served for over three years at United States European Command Headquarters in Germany during the middle of the first Cold War, much of the story came from personal knowledge of the American plans for the defense of Europe and theater-level war games in which I’d participated. How did you conduct the research? Did you have a handful of contacts you relied on, or did you talk to dozens and dozens of people? Over the years we went back many times to revise and update, trying to make it the best it could be. It was probably three years before I was confident enough to start looking to get it published. It took some time to figure this writing thing out. How long did THE RED LINE take you to write?
I was excited to talk more with Gragg about THE RED LINE, and what led him to take on such a difficult task for his first book.
Gragg’s characters are deeply-sketched, and we feel their injuries and frustrations as sharply as they do. Which isn’t to say that the book is all blood and bullets. His book, detailing a futuristic war between Russia and the United States, starts in a war zone and never lets the reader out of it. Walt Gragg pulled off a neat trick in his debut thriller, THE RED LINE-he made a five hundred-page novel feel like an action-packed short story.
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